Individuation

Individuation was Jung\'s term for the pattern of human growth. Dreams are part of the web of psychological factors which create an individual\'s life pattern. Dreams, watched over a period, reveal these patterns, in their own repeated patterns. Jung saw development as unique to each individual. He uses the example of the tree. No pine, he says, grows in an identical way; the impulse of growth is towards unique realization and cannot be systematically described; it is a living experience, charged with imagination, irrational and everchanging. There is a central psychic nucleus (the seed) from which the whole structure of consciousness stems. Jung believed that if one person started on the course of individuation then it would affect and benefit other people around them, and that this in turn would have its effect on external events. MJ